Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Actually, Rand was almost exactly in the middle of the generation that paid for Social Security twice. The first benefits began in 1940. The first generation of retirees were paid directly out of the treasury. The actual SS taxes that Rand paid went into the "trust fund," which was later loaned out to other government agencies, to pay for war mostly.

With emphasis on the "unbelievable," as in "probably complete bullshit." MtGox has been under investigation for a year now, selectively limiting accounts and withdrawals. Karpeles has said himself that the Bitcoins aren't lost, but "temporarily unavailable." There is likely more going on behind the scenes.

I have worked 60+ hour weeks only one time in my life. Before I joined this company, two of the three employees separately contacted me to warn that the boss was, in their words, "crazy." Unfortunately, I didn't believe them. I hadn't had any experience with crazy bosses up until that point in my career. The only other employee quit around the same time.

I lasted four months. The pay was good. And the job would not have been that difficult. It didn't even require more people. But the organization had definitely completely broken down. Everyone did five different jobs, everything from electronics repair to customer service to data processing to moving equipment. This was by design, apparently, in order to make the company more "agile."

I spent a lot of time automating simple data processing tasks, and working on improving physical processes that took a lot of time for no real benefit. But I couldn't make improvements quickly enough. Almost the entire time, the "crazy" boss was literally looking over my shoulder, telling me how to do every little thing in whatever particular way he thought was best. Even though I had been a Unix consultant for nearly a decade, he took it as his personal mission to teach me the wonders of Excel as a universal programming tool. Ugh.

I was actually relieved to eventually be fired, after working two weeks straight, including travel and weekends and 10-11 hour days, simply for taking a day off. One of the other employees left at the same time. The last thing I did was to fix an absolutely crippling issue that I had noticed on the first day on the job, but never had the time to properly investigate. They had re-programmed a bunch of wireless routers with the same MAC address. Brilliant.

Last I heard, they had hired a dozen people shortly after I left. Probably all Excel experts.

It's too late. It was a political decision, and one that that had to be made well in advance. The decision was made a long time ago. Plans were put in place that can't be undone. Industries were bailed-out that shouldn't have been bailed-out. Things were blown up that can't be un-blown-up. Recession and renewables were chosen over nuclear. There is an agenda. Renewables fit it. Nuclear doesn't. The choice was made to push ahead with wind and photovoltaics for those who can afford it, hoping it can scale up quickly enough, leaving the masses in squalor for the time being. Perhaps longer. It's going to be incredibly disruptive, in the US especially. But there's not much that can be done at this point. Nuclear is no longer an option. The only remaining option is the choice between putting the rest of the carbon in the air, risking the environment, or stunting the economy for a period of some decades. I imagine it will come down to a compromise, some mixture of the two that leads to the same death toll either way. There is a popular delusion that subsidized healthcare can mitigate this. But it's pretty much a zero-sum game. Only hard choices remain.

This is pretty much what I clicked on this story in order to say. Charm school should instead concentrate on how to interact with psychopaths. It is a much more general skillset than simply knowing which utensil to put in which hand at dinner.

Perhaps he is just unconcerned with the minutia involved in fields in which he is not an expert, kind of like the loose syntax displayed in your post (extraneous comma, maybe, s/that/who/, mixed construction.) No one thinks that you're "dumb" because of this.

Maybe he's overweight, and would rather consume his food cold in order to burn more calories.

Maybe he has some degree of Autism, which hinders his ability to distinguish between the taste of cold steak and warm steak.

It is possible to ride your bike to work without being Lance Armstrong. In an ideal world, no one would have to choose between being admitted to MIT and knowing exactly how to cut a steak at a formal dinner. But this ain't it.

The investors aren't "snowed". They just happen to be operating in a system which is also generally believe to be unconstrained by the 0th/1st/2nd Laws of Thermodynamics. Some of them have realized this lately, and are attempting to backpedal themselves out of it.